Ben Kenigsberg

You might devour less after watching Food, Inc. 2, and what you eat will probably be healthier.

This crowd-pleasing documentary, directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (“Boys State” and “Girls State”), caters to multiple niches of moviegoer who enjoy rooting for the underdog. Even archivally minded cinephiles — the kind who get nostalgia pangs from watching long-shelved VHS tapes played anew — will find an itch scratched.

This absorbing account of the first recorded summit of the world’s highest mountain is a rare documentary for which re-enactments make complete sense.

New Mexico plays Montana, and not being familiar with the terrain, I was convinced by that. Accurate or not, the landscape gives as sensational a performance as any of the actors.

The mystery aspect is handled obliquely. The film is more of a mood piece, and much of its pitch-black humor derives from the contrast between the barren landscape and the sheer number of horrors it contains.

It’s invigorating to watch these interactions, even if similar filmmaking methods have been used before.

Lost River ponders people and places left behind in the name of progress. Slyly political, it observes the mortgage crisis through a warped looking glass. The cinematographer, Benoît Debie, finds a perverse beauty in the decline.

He can’t be irreverent about his impending death forever, but it’s oddly uplifting to see him so committed to trying — while encouraging every viewer to get a colonoscopy.

The Son of Joseph can be trying in its whimsy, yet it builds to a lovely finale that evokes the Bible, the French Resistance and the surreal.

It is exhausting and exhilarating, cheap looking and slick, a documentary for Maradona fans but also for many others besides.

Union is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well.

The insights the movie has aren’t exceptional; this stranger-than-fiction series of events is enough.

The film leaves the impression that, sadly, comedy may be one of the only paths to peace left in the region.

The familial and personal tensions give it something extra, elevating it beyond the standard historical documentary.

The bitterly funny, multistrand Involuntary, from 2008, is a step forward in the director’s ambition.

A portrait of lives that can’t be reduced to statistics.

There is a fascination in hearing about the logistics of the riot and just how surreal events were for the prisoners.

[A] sobering, sprawling documentary.

Short of walking with Green, a film is an ideal way to share in his knowledge. And after watching The World Before Your Feet, it’s difficult to look at the city the same way.

It uses animation to depict a conflict in fresh dimensions.

If some of the plot seems familiar, the intelligence with which Mr. Clarke dissects the flaws of Britain’s “borstal” system is not. [15 Jun 2017]

While the running time may be indulgent, the experience of feeling trapped in this world is difficult to shake.

In its humor, its fairy tale origins and the characters’ rounded features, it plays more like a vintage Disney work, only nimbler and freer.

Isabelle Dupuis and Tim Geraghty have made a grim and haunting documentary about what it means to burn bright, then die alone.

The plot twists are so spot on that a screenwriter might have rejected them.

This tender, detail-filled movie lives for the moment.

The Wife pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of spinning a fundamentally literary premise into an intelligent screen drama that unfolds with real juice and suspense.

This documentary, directed by the Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band”), plays like a crowd-pleaser, a profile of a politician with the unflagging courage to swim against a rising totalitarian tide. It helps that Navalny has a movie star’s charisma and wit.

An uncannily intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease that affects the mind, The Eternal Memory doesn’t aim to hold spectators’ hands.

To judge Greene’s experiment, not least because of its visible salutary effects, feels like intruding on private breakthroughs. But the discomfiting power of Procession comes from its ability to show and, to all appearances, facilitate them.

For all the ways in which it might give short shrift to the politics or policy of the fund, Worth is uncommonly moving by the standards of biopics and certainly by the standards of movies that risk addressing 9/11 so overtly.

"Miller’s Point” is a Christmas movie more invested in atmosphere, and the qualities of wintry light, than in holiday cheer — and that somehow makes it all the more warm.

A generous and briskly entertaining doc.

To make a movie that ponders the moral rot of an unjust system while under the gun of that unjust system is courageous and artistically potent.

Even moviegoers who know “Psycho” backward and forward...are bound to learn something new from the movie, which addresses the shower scene from critical, historical, theoretical and technical angles, down to the blinding white of the bathroom tiles.

As a documentary, One of Us is a small act of portraiture, but each portrait captures the pain of having a life upended.

Some of what Mandelup captures is the result of sharp observation, and some of it is incredible chance.

While some of the backstage material has an official feel (Batiste and Jaouad are listed among the many executive producers, along with Barack and Michelle Obama), the documentary does not shy from showing private moments.

Hello Dankness belongs to a venerable underground-film tradition of treating refracted entertainment as a mirror for society. No fan of Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” or Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy” could help but smile.

Bugs, an entertaining and eye-opening documentary from Andreas Johnsen, will send moviegoers out with a feeling of culinary adventurousness, eager to sample well-prepared escamoles (ant larvae) or termite queen with mango.

The film may be maddening as a character study, and it could damage an ionizer with its air of self-importance, but its experiments in form and tone are highly original.

It conveys a credible sense of Ailes’s psychology through the testimony of peers and co-workers who witnessed his ruthlessness firsthand.

Whatever reservations it prompts, the film is innovative, original, and queasily effective.

As withholding as it may be in terms of narrative, Stranger places rare faith in the viewer’s visual sense. Guiraudie presents his widescreen long takes with little inflection, conjuring suspense simply from the sounds of crackling leaves and other hallmarks of the natural (or is it au naturel?) realm.

The entire film unfolds in a recognizable register of ominous hesitation; the results are a bit schematic but nevertheless hit on something real.

The North Korea scenes are often very funny, with many of the jokes coming at the expense of the fish-out-of-water visitors.

As philosophy, Mr. Nobody seems sillier than it is profound. But in a parallel reality, more movies would have this degree of insane ambition.

Those who want to see Armstrong sweat may leave disappointed. Calm and seemingly well rehearsed in interviews, Armstrong shrugs off years of public statements without ever seeming truly remorseful.

The film seems unclear on how to unpack all its baggage, but the sense of detail and place carry the day.

For the director, putting family members on camera clearly had a therapeutic value. Witnessing that unburdening feels almost ancillary, even intrusive. But Rewind could only be made by this filmmaker in this way, and that gives it an unsettling fascination.

It shows how the lingering disputes of war ripple through lives after guns have ostensibly been laid down.

The movie has the pleasingly demented texture of early Tim Burton. It bears the logo of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company and is seen from a Spielbergian child’s-eye view.

in covering the repercussions of the branching cases, A Crime on the Bayou shows how superficially straightforward, courageous acts — like refusing to plead guilty unjustly or defending the unjustly accused — are hard.

It seems best to view Serendipity as one component of a much bigger project (a book on Nourry’s work with the same title was published in 2017) — a body of work in which life and art are inseparable.

First and foremost, the movie, written by Nicole Taylor and directed by Tom Harper, is a superb showcase for Jessie Buckley. Doing her own singing, Buckley is a rich, startling vocalist who if anything seems to under-excite the crowds she performs for.

Dancing in the Dust shows Farhadi’s early confidence with using framing and cutting to create tension and parallels — skills that would serve him later.

The harms conversion therapy causes, and the tactics it uses, aren’t news at this point, and Pray Away is more interesting when it focuses on how most of its subjects eventually embraced gay and bisexual identities despite having formerly been so public in their homophobia. Some shifts weren’t long ago.

The adventure plot in the Brazilian feature Tito and the Birds, directed by Gustavo Steinberg, Gabriel Bitar, and André Catoto, is no great shakes — it wouldn’t be out of place on a Saturday-morning cartoon — but visually, the movie leaves room for the viewer to synthesize, and to dream.

They Remain, directed, edited and scripted by Philip Gelatt, from a short story by Laird Barron, shows that it’s possible to a make an engrossing genre piece on limited resources.

Riegel has said that Ruth’s story was inspired by her own challenges leaving the area. Even the medium — Super 16-millimeter film, in the era of digital — adds to the ambience of rusting, abandoned machinery.

Audrie & Daisy is strongest when it investigates what it regards as shortcomings of justice, for reasons technical and implied.

In Maryam Touzani’s Adam, certain stylistic choices — a muted palette, the absence of a melodramatic score, hand-held camerawork — help temper sentimentality with verisimilitude.

While not everything that Bock does is equally fascinating — a director’s personal connection to a subject can be both an advantage and a hindrance — a fair amount of it is endearing, even inspiring.

The real achievement here is in going beyond the buzzwords of newscasts and talking points to convey a sense of what’s happening on the ground — and to give it a sense of urgency.

My Father the Spy doesn’t have a tidy point to make, but it succeeds at bringing a turbulent reminiscence to life.

The Human Factor presents a cogent and involving view of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, mainly from 1991 until the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, told through the recollections of United States negotiators charged with brokering a peace.

Despite the film’s syrupy sweetness, it takes some risks ... and its relentless earnestness is tough to resist, even as the film sugarcoats intimations of real danger.

Absorbing and finely wrought, 1945 is not perfect.

You can’t beat the access or the clips, although the absence of Hudson (whom Roher apparently filmed) from the present-day interviews is peculiar. His voice might have provided a valuable counterpoint to Robertson’s recollections.

Antarctic Edge illustrates its points effectively, providing vivid evidence of how shrinking ice at the South Pole affects climates across the globe.

It can be tough to say whether the movie is productively or arbitrarily baffling, but it is never boring, and it achieves a balance between natural flow and purposefulness that suits its subject matter.

Marcus Vetter and Karin Steinberger’s sprawling documentary probably dives into the weeds too quickly and could have used a tighter edit. Still, drawing on a wealth of courtroom video, the film lays out a persuasive argument for reasonable doubt.

Although the odds of implementing all these ideas might seem steep, “2040” is a rare climate documentary with an optimistic message.

This debut feature from the Spanish-born director Miguel Llansó can’t claim a coherent mythology, but it has a lo-fi charm and humor.

The most barbed aspect of the movie, a National Geographic release, is its acknowledgment of the role that National Geographic itself has played in exoticizing groups like the North Sentinelese.

A close-range film about distance, the short, poignant documentary “I’m Leaving Now” unfolds like a character study.

A lovely ending makes up for the filmmakers’ giving this triangle one blunt side.

Entertaining enough that it leaves one wishing for more in the way of android mythology—a pint-sized Blade Runner or A.I. The screenplay goes on autopilot, grinding toward a happy ending just when it has a shot at something darker and more memorable.

If you’ve spent any time with these characters, it’s hard not to get swept up in the saga, and it’s easy to be moved by the bond between Hiccup and Toothless, who is, in effect, a very loyal dog who can fly and harness the power of lightning bolts.

The main interest lies with Ferencz himself, who comes across as thoughtful, principled and engaging in a film that, in keeping with his demeanor, is a modest profile rather than a sprawling portrait.

“The Boy Who Lived” provides an unusual behind-the-scenes portrait of how life goes on after movies are made.

The Swimmers tells this story as an inspirational (but rarely sugarcoated) crowd-pleaser. Within those terms, it hits its marks.

After Parkland is not easy to watch, and certain choices (of images, of music) could be construed as calculated. But the movie succeeds where it counts: showing the reverberations of violence long after most cameras left.

The fates of several of the movie’s bitcoin entrepreneurs are unlikely to send viewers rushing to exchange their dollars. But The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin nevertheless functions as an entertaining portrait of the unshakable optimism that governs what’s been called a financial Wild West.

While “The Apollo” itself might have taken a more inventive approach, it derives its power from the artistry it captures.

At two hours, the documentary is overstuffed, possibly by design. But it matches a kaleidoscopic form to a kaleidoscopic life story, honoring its subject without simplifying him.

The Hand That Feeds is an effective portrayal of the intricacies of activism — and of a situation in which victories seem all too brief.

As a work of cinema, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch can seem a bit torn in its approach, caught between a desire to spread a message to mainstream viewers and more cryptic, artistic aims. At times, more information would be preferable; in other scenes, images speak volumes without words. But as advocacy, the movie is potent and frequently terrifying.

By addressing strife in Africa in a roundabout way, Liyana breaks free of the heaviness that can weigh down an issue-based documentary.

The movie is more effective as a grim, involving cop thriller than it is as an ostensible statement on the Order’s reverberations in the present.

Despite stodgy trappings, Dateline-Saigon captures a swirl of personalities and conveys the excitement of reporting in a fast-moving, confusing and dangerous atmosphere.

The most charged implication of Hitler’s Hollywood is that artistry enabled the Third Reich.

This upsetting documentary offers plenty to chew on.

Evans has made a lively and illuminating tribute, and not always an unduly flattering one.

In short, Pick of the Litter makes for unexpectedly suspenseful (and perhaps not entirely reputable) viewing.

As a chronicle of how San Francisco has changed over the years — and as a salute to the city’s role as a back lot for masters like Erich von Stroheim and Howard Hawks — The Green Fog is a wonder of excavation and urban history. What it says about Hitchcock is more ambiguous.

Casting Cassel as a ruthless villain might seem like a cliche, but Kleiman uses him counterintuitively, locating an avuncular, calming quality in the actor.

If, like its characters, Thank You for Your Service sometimes struggles to balance staying strong with wearing its heart on its sleeve, it makes an emotional plea in a direct, effective way.